Redux
by shywr1ter
Summary: Right after all that happened in 'Bury Your Dead,' Tim can't sleep. The events of the past hours keep him awake; the events of the past weeks and months lead him to reflect on just who Tony DiNozzo really is -- and why it matters. Friendship/family.


_Disclaimer: NCIS characters and plot references merely borrowed._

_A/N: I haven't done a wholly-NCIS fic in forever, but this has been working at me for the past few days. It wasn't going to go away until it got put up. Spoilers for a bit of everything up through "Bury Your Dead." Other than maybe a small matter or two, this should be canon-compliant. Any and all comments and input is appreciated._

_Tim can't sleep.  
_

_**REDUX**_

Tim finished the last page of the book, and slowly, silently closed the back cover, staring at the photo grinning back at him. It was his own face, the photo familiar now after having been reproduced over thousands of covers, beaming back at him with all the excitement and enthusiasm bubbling inside at the thought then, so long ago, that he was on his way to being a published author.

He felt a little sick inside.

He'd done them all such an injustice: Gibbs, Ziva ... even sweet, inoffensive Abby ... Tony. He'd made them cartoons of themselves and had written them as merely shallow, simple caricatures of who they really were. They'd been offended with his novel, alternately griping about his representation of them, and mocking his attempt – and not buying for one minute that he hadn't used them as his models. Only Gibbs had been completely silent about it all ... well, had been, until someone had stolen his lame attempts at a sequel and had started killing the "characters" in his next book.

The memory was still painful, especially how close Abby had come to being another of his victims. The whole thing had killed his interest in writing for a long time. They'd even stopped ribbing him about the book, for the most part, maybe the whole "crazed fan" thing bringing it too close for all of them.

It was late, 3:17 a.m. Apart from the whir of the HVAC unit down the hall and the soft traffic noise from the parkway, busy even this late in this near suburb of the District, his place was silent.

It had been a hard day. A _helluva_ day, a hard week, a challenging year. He wasn't sure why he picked up the book; he hadn't reread his 'big bestseller' for months, hadn't even wanted to think about it despite his publisher's demand for a sequel, since it had led someone to actually murder innocent people, all just for being unwitting fodder for his stories. But after today, after watching Tony die in a fiery explosion, even if he was 'lost' to them for only a few hours, the crime scene theirs to process after watching one of their own blown to bits, as far as they knew... to then have Tony then appear intact in the elevator, pissed off, tense and ... and facing his own losses ...

Tim couldn't sleep. He started remembering his early days at NCIS ... and Kate ... and the person he'd been then ... the person he was now. And he started remembering that naive, over-simplistic view he had of them all back then, of the job – and of his teammates – all captured in his best-selling novel. Almost as a penance, he got up to pull a copy of his novel from the shelf, sat down, and started to read it all over again. The further he went, the more he regretted having so perfectly captured his probie cluelessness of the time.

Tim looked back at the book in his hands, turning it over to see the cover, his thoughts funneling back to the person he'd been when he'd started writing it. He'd begun writing about NCIS even before he'd been made an actual field agent, daydreaming of being part of the team he'd gone to assist, imagining what it would be like to be a part of a team, a real investigator, and it found form in the novel he began, with himself as a pivotal character on the team. And when he was then plucked from computer geek obscurity by the legendary Leroy Jethro Gibbs – LJ Tibbs such a painfully obvious parody of that name, he cringed – the book had taken on a life of its own.

Tim had always dabbled in writing for fun, and he was so enamored of the idea that he was actually going to get to be a field agent with one of the best teams NCIS had, so amazed that he was actually being given this opportunity, that of course his day job began to show up in his nightly scribbling. Early on it had been his outlet for his frustration when he messed up, for his naive surprise that there were agents like Tony and medical examiners like Ducky and forensic scientists like Abby, each admittedly gaining results but eccentric and quirky and in Tony's case, his own personal demon...

Tim frowned. Of all of them, he'd probably misjudged Tony the most. Maybe it was because Tony worked the hardest at being someone he wasn't, maybe even partly in order to smack the innocence and guilelessness out of him. He owed Tony for that. Most of the time, he knew it was vital to his safety and the team's, knew it would make him a far better agent and allow him to focus and learn that much faster when there was oh, so much to learn. But sometimes – he wished Tony hadn't been so effective at toughening him up. Or at least, at knocking the stars from his eyes.

He got up and went to the refrigerator, pulling out a bottle of milk and swigging a healthy mouthful from the container. Capping it, he reflected he wouldn't have done that before joining NCIS and could even hear Tony goading him, "C'mon, McGeek, you're an armed federal agent! Only sissies use a glass – do you think James Bond would stop saving the world long enough to get a glass for his milk?"

Tony. Sure, he'd learned volumes from Gibbs about being an investigator and an agent, but Tony had taught him about himself, about his value to the team – not all intended, true, but probably more than he realized or planned...

Tim froze momentarily, the thought having appeared on its own, but undeniably true. He really _had_. Tony had actually been more of a teacher, role model – and _mentor_ – to him than Gibbs had been. He had learned more from the overgrown adolescent than he ever gave Tony credit for, reflecting that one could learn as much – maybe more – from a negative example as a positive one, especially when it became clear that the person really _did_ know the difference, deep down, and maybe was just doing what he did for effect.

If so, the effect certainly was made. How many people, over his life, underestimated DiNozzo as a skirt-chasing, less-than-thoughtful, beer-ponging jock?

Did _DiNozzo_?

Tim found himself wondering how much Tony acted the way he did because even he himself bought into his carefully worn persona, a shallow chauvinist, a goof who at times got lucky in investigating crimes. Given some of the other things he'd seen, he could imagine that Tony would be more likely to believe that of himself than to believe that he was the Yoda to Tim's unenlightened probieness.

Maybe Tony didn't even realize he did it. But in his months as team leader, as he both consciously and unconsciously took on much of Gibbs' persona to take over for their AWOL leader, he might have started drinking coffee and sneaking up on them, started laughing less and demanding more, but he did so with campfires and rousing team compliments, too. And he never, ever hit them on the back of the head – not when _he_ was Boss. He had done it only when Gibbs was Boss and Tony played the comic relief, the second banana. Never when he was Boss himself.

And when Gibbs came back, despite the grief they all gave him when he'd slip back into Boss mode, Tony had managed fairly quickly to move back into the second spot and, without too many weeks gone, ease them all back into the roles they'd had before Gibbs took off. Tim reflected now how seamlessly and painlessly they'd managed it – and it only now occurred to him it was painless for him because of the pratfalls and 'slips' Tony had provided them all...

How had he missed it, all this time? Did even Tony himself realize just how much he filtered Gibbs for the rest of them, both before and after Gibbs had left for Mexico, diffusing the otherwise abrasive impact of Gibbs' obsessive investigations, like hunting Ari, like his stony silences and often less than patient demands for answers? As a green kid, Tim had been struck dumb by Gibbs' powerful reactions and, as he stood quaking, never had understood how Tony had the nerve to say such stupid or clueless or misogynistic things in the middle of a serious investigation, earning him a head slap or a yell or even a barked dressing down, when Gibbs thought the act was particularly dim-witted. Tony had been there to diffuse Gibbs' intensity, to allow him to pop off at his senior agent and let the team move forward again...

Tim drew a long, silent breath, yet another new truth having suddenly dawned on him. "Well, I'll be damned," he murmured to the empty room. How could he have missed this for so long, and have so misjudged the agent from whom he had learned the most? Someone had once pointed out that the team – both the current team, and the team they'd been when Kate was still with them – was like a family, especially the field agents: Gibbs, the gruff but caring father, and his three agents, the squabbling siblings, Tony always the irritating, know-it-all older brother who made the younger siblings' lives hell. At the time, Tim hadn't made much of it but knew it hadn't felt quite right. Now, it made more sense...

Yeah. And now he understood why the analogy never quite fit for him.

He stood staring at the floor, unseeing, as his realization brought back events long before finished and words long ago said. His life at NCIS began making sense, fitting into place. Gibbs as the father figure, the role model – it was an easy analogy, and might readily seem that way to outsiders. But Gibbs was the polar opposite of his own sweet, inoffensive, pleasantly mousy math professor father, so much so that it never occurred to Tim that Gibbs could fill a father role for him. Mentor, sure; Boss, most definitely. But his own dad was ... well, _Dad_. His one and only father, the only one he ever needed and the only one he'd sought. And from what he'd heard and guessed, Ziva might have all sorts of crazy family issues, but she already had a strong, larger-than-life father and didn't need a second just like him in her life.

...so only _one_ of them needed a father to approve of him, to be proud. Only one of them needed that father figure to follow; only one needed to work tirelessly for affirmation, in the hope that he would measure up...

Tim let his breath out through pursed lips, the revelation moving. He felt a sudden sense of empathy and protective concern for Tony that he never thought he'd feel...

They'd _lost _Tony that day – or so they'd thought. The smoldering remains of his car and the charred body inside – Tim had had no idea why he'd been so insistent that it wasn't really Tony in the car but he began to realize it was less investigatory hunch or psychic knowledge, and more just flat-out denial. Had anyone asked, even then, just a handful of hours ago, he wouldn't have described Tony as a friend and would have assumed that the senior agent still thought of him as a hapless probie. His dogged review of the traffic videos and his plodding, stubborn quest for answers was more to try to bring Tony back than a real belief that he could have survived.

Thank God he did. For Tony's life itself, of course, but ... but selfishly, for him too, so he would have some time to think about all of this, to understand Tony a little better, maybe understand why Tony did what he did, over the years. Maybe in doing so, he could better understand that the agent he himself was becoming, the agent who now regularly got compliments from Gibbs as often as ribbing from Tony, was in large part due to the eccentricities of this older-brother agent, the man who worked so hard for Gibbs' pride and approval while looking out for the younger kid on the team.

In a soft snort of surprise at his revelations, Tim looked at the clock again. He almost – almost – wanted to give Tony a call. 3:42 a.m. Tony would think he was crazy and call him all sorts of names. But, Tim now suspected, it would still mean something to the man to know that he had been missed, that the team grieved with the thought of the hole that would have been left by his loss...

Tony had all kinds of things going on at the moment and didn't need his call in the middle of night anyway – just for starters, there was the revelation of the secret op masterminded by the Director, one that clearly rattled Gibbs; a spectacular attempt on his life that forced him to confess to the woman he'd fallen for – La Grenouille's daughter, all part of the plan – that he wasn't who he said he was. Ziva had speculated, in an odd, tight little way, that Tony apparently had grown to have real feelings for the daughter, a really bone-headed thing to do on a mission. And all that after having been a hostage, just hours before, along with this woman he loved, receiving a likely concussion to boot.

Yeah, Tony had enough going on, he didn't need Tim's call.

For the first time since he'd known Tony, Tim suddenly felt as if he might have seen behind all the joking and hazing and name-calling, and maybe had a bit of insight into what made Tony_ Tony._ He was far more complicated than "Agent Tommy," far more deserving of his thanks and appreciation that Tim had even given him credit for being.

Tim stood and crossed over to his computer. Not a call, then, in the middle of the night, in the middle of his life going horribly sideways in the past twenty four hours. But Tony'd had a point when he appeared intact in the elevator, bringing substance to Ducky's revelation that he was not lying charred in autopsy, as he wryly complained, _"What, no balloons?"_

Tim owed him a lot. He owed him much more than the unthinking "Agent Tommy" persona he'd given him, owed Tony for the agent he'd become, owed him a more thoughtful appreciation of all he'd done for him. His fingers flew over the keyboard and in only a few hours, Agent DiNozzo would find a dozen shiny, metallic balloons delivered to his desk with a cheery "Welcome Home!" message for all to see – from an anonymous admirer.

After all – Tony had taught him well.


End file.
